Monday, February 18, 2008

You know how it is, you intend to go here, where people who read this accumulate of a Saturday night, because unaccountably it has the entirety of this on the jukebox. A simple and uncomplicated, even non-controversial Wyatt (re-dubbed Foxxing in homage to the evening’s disconcerter of choice,) Various parties (who shallremainnameless) assemble above a chip shop near the Blackwall tunnel. Camouflage gear is donned, war paint applied, cyanide capsules secreted beneath tongues.

Then it all goes horribly wrong.

Tonight of all nights it seems that Greenwich’s least popular pub is hosting someone’s twenty first birthday party. There’s a rather disconcerting moment in the entrance when we encounter a crowd of expectant relatives holding balloons, cards and party poppers waiting for the birthday girl to turn up. One of our party actually runs away at this point in a state of near delirium (errr….me.) We sneak in the side entrance. What kind of man would attempt to Wyatt a twenty-first birthday party?

Certainly not me, before you start sending death threats, and besides the Jukebox is perched inaccessibly behind a trellis table containing such timeless Brit Classics as crustless Beef-paste sarnies, partially defrosted sausage rolls, Fairy cakes and bowls of luminous Tangy Lime and Vomit Flavored Doritos (all looks the same when it’s coming out the other end, dunnit?)

The birthday girl arrives as we get a seat at the back to have a pint before presumably heading on to pastures new. Then another problem rears its head. The seventy year old guy doing the Deejaying appears to be a genius. First track is some kind of epic cold pop number, a sleigh ride across a blasted tundra. Next it’s a slice of robosensual Timabalandesque R and B. Who is this? Amerie? Beyonce? It’s bloody good. By the time the third brilliant track in a row is over, Comrade Infinite (who shall remain nameless) has been obliged to ask the septuagenarian wizard-on-the-wheels-of-steel just what it was. Apparently it’s the latest Hot Chip single.

Holy Fuck! Who possibly might be the next band played at this rate. It transpires, however, that Granddad has NO idea what he’s playing, employing an entirely aleatory approach to the noble art of Deejaying (which we naturally applaud) by randomly selecting tracks off two separate compilations. Genius. John Cage would be proud. We’re being reverse-Wyatted by a pensioner.

Next thing you know we’re dancing. Was it “Baggy Trousers” that did it? Vague memories come back to me of Monster Bobby’s extraordinary, chest high bouts of knee-juggling, but whatever it was that set us off, there was certainly an almost painfully extended megamix of YMCA complete with acronymic arm flinging and, I’m forced to admit, a thoroughly uncoordinated solo attempt at the Macarena ( “dale alegria a tu cuerpo Impostumo!”) in the middle of which I bump into a slightly surprised work colleague. “Do you know Jessica?” she asks. “Errrr…”.I reply. A conga line is formed. I feel obliged to join it ( anything to get your hands on a prepubescent chavettes muffin-top at my age, innit?) Monster Bobby meanwhile has got into the kind of jackhammering pelvis and gelatinous knee joints routine that momentarily makes you worry he may needed hospitalising later, while Baron Hatherly of Woolwich shimmies his ineffable way through Tainted Love one hand louchely parked in his trouser pocket and La Power Xpresses her own-nasty-self with exactly the kind of prancingly aloof, glacial kittenishness that must keep many a fusty academic’s heart palpitating wobbly as he tries to sleep under his office desk of a night. Whoops!

Ahh, well…… It’ll have to be next week then….

It’s official. South London 21st birthday parties are the new Sonar festival.